The Lying Stones of Marrakech Read Free Page B

human hands, either recently in an attempt to defraud, or long ago for pagan purposes. Alas, after publishing his book and trumpeting the contents, Beringer realized that he had indeed been duped, presumably by his students playing a prank. (Some sources say that he finally acknowledged the trickery when he found his own name written in Hebrew letters on one stone.) According to legend, the brokenhearted Beringer then impoverished himself by attempting to buy back all copies of his book—and died dispirited just a few years later. Beringer’s false fossils have been known ever since as Lügensteine , or “lying stones.”
    To illustrate the pedigree of the canonical tale, I cite the version given in the most famous paleontological treatise of the early nineteenth century, Dr. James Parkinson’s Organic Remains of a Former World (volume 1, 1804). Parkinson, a physician by training and a fine paleontologist by avocation, identified and gave his name to the degenerative disease that continues to puzzle and trouble us today. He wrote of his colleague Beringer:
    One work, published in 1726, deserves to be particularly noticed; since it plainly demonstrates, that learning may not be sufficient to prevent an unsuspecting man, from becoming the dupe of excessive credulity. It is worthy of being mentioned on another account: the quantity of censure and ridicule, to which its author was exposed, served, not only to render his cotemporaries [ sic ] less liable to imposition; but also more cautious in indulging in unsupported hypotheses…. We are here presented with the representation of stones said to bear petrifactions of birds; some with spread, others with closed, wings: bees and wasps, both resting in their curiously constructed cells, and in the act of sipping honey from expanded flowers … and, to complete the absurdity, petrifactions representing the sun, moon, stars, and comets: with many others too monstrous and ridiculous to deserve even mention. These stones, artfully prepared,had been intentionally deposited in a mountain, which he was in the habit of exploring, purposely to dupe the enthusiastic collector. Unfortunately, the silly and cruel trick, succeeded in so far, as to occasion to him, who was the subject of it, so great a degree of mortification, as, it is said, shortened his days.
    All components of the standard story line, complete with moral messages, have already fallen into place—the absurdity of the fossils, the gullibility of the professor, the personal tragedy of his undoing, and the two attendant lessons for aspiring young scientists: do not engage in speculation beyond available evidence, and do not stray from the empirical method of direct observation.
    In this century’s earlier and standard work on the history of geology ( The Birth and Development of the Geological Sciences , published in 1934), Frank Dawson Adams provides some embellishments that had accumulated over the years, including the unforgettable story, for which not a shred of evidence has ever existed, that Beringer capitulated when he found his own name in Hebrew letters on one of his stones. Adams’s verbatim “borrowing” of Parkinson’s last line also illustrates another reason for invariance of the canonical tale: later retellings copy their material from earlier sources:
    Some sons of Belial among his students prepared a number of artificial fossils by moulding forms of various living or imaginary things in clay which was then baked hard and scattered in fragments about on the hillsides where Beringer was wont to search for fossils…. The distressing climax was reached, however, when later he one day found a fragment bearing his own name upon it. So great was his chagrin and mortification in discovering that he had been made the subject of a cruel and silly hoax, that he endeavored to buy up the whole edition of his work. In doing so he impoverished himself and it is said